Radar Days

The peepers were chirping before the rain all week now. I had passed them a couple of times in the dead corn field near the highway. Heralds to more storms, which we again briefly experienced that afternoon. “Tornado threat increasing,” reported all the local news stations and most of my siblings. It’s amazing how dark it can get in the afternoon.

Most of my day ended up being Spanish and scrubbing up the house, completed before the 1:20 game up in Chicago which was apparently swimming in a batch of thick fog.

When Puck came bouncing out of the gym, we hit asphalt to get back home before a storm that broke way south and completely missed us. So much for all that hype.

As we drove, Puck asked questions about tornadoes. “What would happen if there was a tornado right in front of us?” he stared at the bridge we were about to approach.

“Well, we’d leave the car. That’s the worst place to be. And probably flatten ourselves on the side of the road. We wouldn’t have another choice.”

“Well, it wouldn’t really matter anyway,” Puck replied. “Because the next moment we would be with the Lord.”

“That’s true, but…” I also explained the concept of making responsible life-promoting decisions and self-preservation.

After dinner, Puck had polished off another bowl of strawberries and clementines.

“Couldn’t we have a mansion, Mom?”

“We don’t really need one, do we? There’s only three of us. You don’t want tons of brothers and sisters, do you?”

Puck’s hazel eyes popped. “YES!”

“But then you’d have to be home schooled again. I couldn’t afford to send all those kids to school.”

“Well, I would just go to school and the rest of them would be home schooled. You could adopt a ton of kids. But we’d have to buy one who’s really old. Like a 6th grader. So he could stay with the other kids while Dad drives me to school.”

To be honest, I can’t really blame him on the notion of “paying”. After all, you do have to fork over an extensive amount of checks to complete an adoption. Puck moved on from that campaign to a stack of index cards and a box of colored Sharpies, waiting for the next round of storms.